Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

318V. I. LENINgotten that no land nationalisation, no equalised landtenure, will abolish the now fully established fact that thewell-to-do peasants in Russia are already farming on capitalistlines. In my Development of Capitalism I showedthat, according to the statistics of the eighties and ninetiesof the last century, about one-fifth of the peasant householdsaccount for up to half of peasant agricultural productionand a much larger share of rented land; that the farmsof these peasants are now commodity-producing farmsrather than natural-economy farms, and that, finally,these peasants cannot exist without a vast army of farmhandsand day-labourers.* Among these peasants the elementsof capitalist rent are taken for granted. These peasantsexpress their interests through the mouths of thePeshekhonovs, who “soberly” reject the prohibition of hiredlabour as well as “socialisation of the land”, who soberlychampion the point of view of the peasant economic individualismwhich is asserting itself. If, in the utopias ofthe Narodniks, we carefully separate the real economicfactor from the false ideology, we shall see at once that itis precisely the bourgeois peasantry which stands to gainmost from the break-up of the feudal latifundia, irrespectiveof whether that is carried out by division, nationalisation,or municipalisation. “Loans and grants” from thestate, too, are bound to benefit the bourgeois peasantryin the first place. The “peasant agrarian revolution” isnothing but the subordination of the whole system of landownershipto the conditions of progress and prosperity ofprecisely these capitalist farms.Money rent is the moribund yesterday, which cannotbut die out. Capitalist rent is the nascent tomorrow, whichcannot but develop under the Stolypin expropriation ofthe poor peasants (“under Article 87”), as well as under thepeasant expropriation of the richest landlords.7. UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS CAN NATIONALISATIONBE BROUGHT ABOUT?The view is often met with among Marxists that nationalisationis feasible only at a high stage of developmentof capitalism, when it will have fully prepared the con-* See present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 136-39.—Ed.